Samsung illuminates the city of London

Gone are the days of car shopping that consisted of wandering around the showroom and taking the shortlisted candidates around the block for a spin. Ford has teamed up with Alibaba to build a vending machine for cars that you can try before you buy. The vending machine has capacity for 42 cars that can be dispensed to prospective buyers who have paid the necessary fees using Alibaba’s Tmall app and in true 2018 style, sharing a selfie. Users have the opportunity to try 10 different models ranging from the Explorer to an imported Mustang.

As of 23 April, Starbucks will begin testing a new, cashless system in some of South Korea’s busiest office districts including Gangnam, Guru and Pangyo. This will be the second cashless store trial for Starbucks following the opening of their first test store in Seattle, Washington. While the use of cash has been declining rapidly everywhere, Starbucks Coffee Korea said that in some parts of the country, cash payments equate to just 7% of the total payments. This figure has dropped from 31% of total payments in 2010.

The city of London was luminous last Friday evening thanks to a spectacular light show produced by Samsung to promote the launch of its new Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones. Rather than to simply dazzle audiences “The Night Reimagined” was aimed at assisting Londoners to take night-time photos of the city’s famous monuments, showcasing the Galaxy’s low-light photography features. The installation lit up the night sky with colorful lasers, projecting across the Thames river from Potters Fields Park onto London’s Leadenhall Building.

Affectiva has launched a new Automotive AI service designed for creators of autonomous vehicles to track users’ emotional response. The service can pick up emotions like joy, surprise, fear, or anger from a person’s face as well as laughter and arousal levels from their voice. The Automotive offering is Affectiva’s third service for tracking the emotional response of product users and is part of a long-term strategy to build emotional profiles drawn from smart speakers, autonomous vehicles, and other platforms with a video camera or conversational interface. Once fully autonomous vehicles without drivers hit the road, Affectiva will then switch its focus from drivers to passengers, using voice and facial recognition to recognize occupants and personalize such things as temperature and lighting inside a vehicle. Learn more about the Automotive AI service below.

With the world of AR constantly advancing, typographers and graphic designers are having to find more and more inventive ways of creating branding, type and imagery. Weird Type is a new app that brings together AR and type, encouraging users to manipulate text by enabling them to create and play with typography in the air in front of them. Have a look at some pretty awesome things you can do with Weird Type below.

Snapchat continues to roll out new ad tools to keep advertisers using the platform, including two new location-based targeting options. The first is a location category filter, where advertisers can target an audience based on location type, like a beach, movie theatre or university. This means a brand producing laptops can target universities nationwide, or narrow their location categories by state, cities and more. The company says its location-type ad filter is unique and would be difficult to achieve on any other major ad platform. Snapchat is also rolling out radius-targeting, which lets advertisers target audiences based on a specific geographic point. This feature is similar to current offerings by Facebook. The targeting formats are slowly rolling out internationally and will be accessible in Snapchat’s Ads Manager platform.